Three children in a museum, a children's author and life in the 1800s make A S Byatt's latest an engrossing read
Three children in a museum, a children's author and life in the 1800s make A S Byatt's latest an engrossing read This book opens with mystery, adventure, and three young boys in a museum. We see the world through the eyes of one, then of the other.
Until I unexpectedly came upon a vigorous scene where one of them is "going solo" (to pinch a catchy phrase from Gary Kirsten), I actually thought it might be a book for children perhaps the book A S Byatt thought Harry Potter should have been.
This author is known for her intellectual depth and vast knowledge ("I doubt whether Byatt found it necessary to do much research for this novel: she is a highly informed person in many fields," one reviewer wrote). This makes her work one of those "many-layered" affairs which give a broad cultural and sociological view of the place and period of history her fiction is set in. The events in this book take place primarily in London and Kent, between June 1895 and April 1920. Through them, we observe how families from different socio-economic levels live. We get acquainted with the Fabian and suffragette movements, life as a university student in those days, the poetry, puppetry and pottery of the time, how the museums in London developed, various other facets of Edwardian life and times, and also what it was like during the War in Europe (which of course we know as the First World War). There are guest appearances by familiar writers like Oscar Wilde, Kipling and E M Forster. In simple farmhouses in the Downs, they had servant problems and problems with the plumbing.
We experience vicariously how different things were in a world without effective means of birth control. As was true throughout history before the 1960s, children are born like weeds. Most families have large groups of them, and Byatt briefly explains how, because of their unwieldy numbers, they tend to get classified within the families as the older lot, the middle lot, the younger lot, the boys, the girls, the twins, the ones who did not survive, and so on. A favourite child could well be one who isn't even alive any more. Parentage is often a delicate matter, to be diplomatically evaded or lied about. Unexpected or secret blood ties engender inexplicable affection and resemblances.
This is not the only reason that it's called The Children's Book. In an interview to the Man Booker Prize foundation, Byatt said that she'd noticed that children of great writers for children often came to unhappy ends. Her own heroine Olive Wellwood is a children's writer, and this book is their story too.
Yet, and despite its 620 pages, I wouldn't call this book "heavy". In fact it is easy and engaging. Though there is a huge cast of characters, related to each other in intricate, complicated and sometimes unacknowledged ways, each is dealt with in separate sections in small groups which absorb you completely as you read and the transitions from one to the other are gentle.
I found no stuntsmanship in the prose either there are no words or phrases that leap out and strike your consciousness, diverting you from the story. The complex plot unfolds in a placid, matter-of-fact manner. When the narrator digresses from the story, it's to explore interesting historical aspects.
If I do have a regret about this book, it's that I was unable to read slowly and savour it the way it deserves to be read.
